0000000000225863
AUTHOR
Franca Rinaldi
Robust control of production-distribution systems
A class of production-distribution problems with unknown-but-bounded uncertain demand is considered. At each time, the demand is unknown but each of its components is assumed to belong to an assigned interval. Furthermore, the system has production and transportation capacity constraints. We face the problem of finding a control strategy that keeps the storage levels bounded. We also deal with the case in which storage level bounds are assigned and the controller must keep the state within these bounds. Both discrete and continuous time models are considered. We provide basic necessary and sufficient conditions for the existence of such strategies. We propose several possible feedback contr…
An exact algorithm for the min-cost network containment problem
A network design problem which arises in the distribution of a public utility provided by several competitive suppliers is studied. The problem addressed is that of determining minimum-cost (generalized) arc capacities in order to accommodate any demand between given source–sink pairs of nodes, where demands are assumed to fall within predetermined ranges. Feasible flows are initially considered as simply bounded by the usual arc capacity constraints. Then, more general linear constraints are introduced which may limit the weighted sum of the flows on some subsets of arcs. An exact cutting plane algorithm is presented for solving both of the above cases and some computational results are re…